Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Ever since that whole Chinese Thing, which pissed a lot of people off, I've been ever so slightly cautious about dropping bombs into Full Disclosure.

I mean, what business of mine is it if silly programmers think making a public proxy of your machine is The Right Thing To Do? After all, McAfee did it, right? So it must be a Good Thing.

I'm sure you've noticed those new proxies on a certain port in a certain country. My database shows they started appearing in August of this year. They're all over the globe, but almost two-thirds are in that certain country.

And if you go to any number of new-ish proxy lists, you'll find these proxies being tested in near-real time. They work pretty good, they disappear, and then they come back.

It doesn't take advanced Google-Fu to find out what's going on. You will even find a certain tech support article on how to open up a certain port on a certain operating system.

WTF were they thinking?

Rather than ruin a good thing (decent proxies are so hard to come by these days), I'm keeping my mouth shut.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Let me just say up front I am not in the business of pirating software.

These days. The 90s was a different story. But I digress.

A few years back, I bought an Auvitek ATSC USB dongle for an XP system. It was cheap and it worked great. It was bundled with "BlazeDTV v3.5" for tuning, recording, playback, etc. Then I upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit and it stopped working. Even after finding the 64-bit drivers for it (after a long hard search) it still wouldn't work. So it sat in a drawer until one day when I "inherited" another XP system. I ran the installation disk, plugged in the dongle, and it asked me for the serial number, which I promptly plugged in.

And the little rat bastard told me I had installed it on too many systems. It refused to run.

Problem was, it was phoning home to check on the serial number. I null routed the mothership, ran setup again, and everything was fine. Can't call home, can't check the serial, can't brick the software. No problem. I made it a permanent entry in my local DNS recursor (PowerDNS).

This worked great for months. It works with Windows 7 32-bit just fine. Then today I was playing around with proxies (as usual) on IE9 (which I don't normally use). Forgot about it and went to watch some TV.

And it wanted the serial number. When I plugged it in it said "FUCK YOU" and refused to run. At that point I remembered I had set IE up with some proxy in God-Know-Where (probably some MikroTik router in Venezuela--those are pretty fast) and it found the mothership.

So here's my (BAD) serial number if you need it...

MU3MJNBK9LRH4-6H8ECXDT5MVA

It's no good. It's used up. Huffed. So I don't feel bad about giving it out.

You need to add this line to your local hosts file:

127.0.0.1 www.blazevideo.com blazevideo.com

And that will kill the mothership, which you will never be able to hit with anything ever again.